Introduction

Critics are calling I AM PILGRIM:
"Unputdownable." —Booklist
"The best book of 2014." —Suspense Magazine
"The next Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." —The New York Post

A breakneck race against time…and an implacable enemy.

An anonymous young woman murdered in a run-down hotel, all identifying characteristics dissolved by acid.

A father publicly beheaded in the blistering heat of a Saudi Arabian public square.

A notorious Syrian biotech expert found eyeless in a Damascus junkyard.

Smoldering human remains on a remote mountainside in Afghanistan.

A flawless plot to commit an appalling crime against humanity.

One path links them all, and only one man can make the journey.

Pilgrim.

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, June 2014: Two men, both attempting to remain invisible to the world around them, are unknowingly at odds. â??Pilgrimâ?? is an American intelligence operative who, despite wanting to retire to a â??normalâ?? life, stumbles upon the biggest case of his career. His story starts with an unrelated murder in a seedy New York hotel room and quickly escalates to a matter of national security. The events unfold in slow motion, and we see the past and present from both Pilgrimâ??s perspective and that of his unknown adversary, a man of single-minded devotion and incredible danger. In his debut novel, Hollywood screenwriter and producer Terry Hayes has concocted a riveting 600-page read that is part police procedural, part international spy thriller, and all ready for adaptation. --Robin A. Rothman

Excerpt

I AM PILGRIM

CHAPTER 1

There are places I’ll remember all my life – Red Square with a hot wind howling across it, my mother’s bedroom on the wrong side of 8-Mile, the endless gardens of a fancy foster home, a man waiting to kill me in a group of ruins known as the Theatre of Death.

But nothing is burned deeper in my memory than a walk-up in New York - threadbare curtains, cheap furniture, a table loaded with tina and other party drugs. Lying next to the bed are a handbag, black panties the size of dental floss and a pair of six-inch Jimmy Choo’s. Like their owner, they don’t belong here. She is naked in the bathroom – floating face down in a bathtub full of sulfuric acid, the active ingredient in a drain cleaner available at any supermarket.

Dozens of empty bottles of the cleaner – DrainBomb, it’s called - lie scattered on the floor. Unnoticed, I start picking through them. They’ve all got their price tags still attached and I see that, in order to avoid suspicion, whoever killed her bought them at twenty different stores. I’ve always said it’s hard not to admire good planning.

The place is in chaos, the noise deafening – police radios blaring, coroner’s assistants yelling for support, an Hispanic woman sobbing. Even if a victim doesn’t know anyone in the world, it seems like there’s always someone sobbing at a scene like this.

The young woman in the bath is unrecognizable - the three days she has spent face-down in the acid have destroyed all her features. That was the plan I guess – whoever killed her had also weighed down her hands with telephone books. The acid has dissolved not only her fingerprints but almost the entire metacarpal structure underneath. Unless the forensic guys at the NYPD get lucky with a dental match, they’ll have a helluva time putting a name to this one.

In places like this, where you get a feeling evil still clings to the walls, your mind can veer into strange territory. The idea of a young woman without a face made me think of a Lennon/McCartney groove from long ago – it’s about Eleanor Rigby, a woman who wore a face that she kept in a jar by the door. In my head I start calling the victim Eleanor. The crime scene team still have work to do but there isn’t a person in the place who doesn’t think Eleanor was killed during sex: the mattress half off the base, the tangled sheets, a brown spray of decaying arterial blood on a bedside table. The really sick ones figure he cut her throat while he was still inside her. The bad thing is – they may be right. However she died, those that look for blessings may find one here – she wouldn’t have realized what was happening, not until the last moment anyway.

Tina – crystal meth – would have taken care of that. It makes you so damn horny, so euphoric as it hits your brain that any sense of foreboding would have been impossible. Under its influence the only coherent thought most people can marshal is to find a partner and bang their back out.

Next to the two empty foils of tina is what looks like one of those tiny shampoo bottles you get in hotel bathrooms.

Unmarked, it contains a clear liquid – GHB I figure. It’s getting a lot of play now in the dark corners of the web: in large doses it is replacing rohypnol as the date-rape drug of choice. Most music venues are flooded with it: clubbers slug a tiny cap to cut tina, taking the edge off of its paranoia. But GHB also comes with its own side effects – a loss of inhibitions and a more intense sexual experience. On the street one of its names is Easy Lay. Kicking off her Jimmy’s, stepping out of her tiny black skirt, Eleanor must have been a rocket on the 4th of July.

As I move through the crush of people – unknown to any of them, a stranger with an expensive jacket slung over his shoulder and a lot of freight in his past - I stop at the bed. I close out the noise and in my mind I see her on top, naked, riding him cowgirl. She is in her early 20s with a good body and I figure she is right into it - the cocktail of drugs whirling her towards a crescendo of orgasms, her body temperature soaring thanks to the meth, her swollen breasts pushing down, her heart and respiratory rate rocketing under the onslaught of passion and chemicals, her breath coming in gulping bursts, her wet tongue finding a mind of its own and searching hard for the mouth below. Sex today sure isn’t for sissies.

Neon signs from a row of bars outside the window would have hit the blonde highlights in her three hundred dollar haircut and sparkled off a Panerai diver’s watch. Yeah, it’s fake but it’s a good one. I know this woman. We all do - the type anyway. You see them in the huge new Prada store in Milan, queuing outside the clubs in Soho, sipping skinny lattes in the hot cafes on the Avenue Montaigne - young women who mistake People magazine for news and a Japanese symbol on their backs as a sign of rebellion.

I imagine the killer’s hand on her breast, touching a jeweled nipple ring. The guy takes it between his fingers and yanks it, pulling her closer. She cries out, revved - everything is hyper-sensitive now, especially her nipples. But she doesn’t mind - if somebody wants it rough, it just means they must really like her. Perched on top of him, the headboard banging hard against the wall, she would have been looking at the front door - locked and chained for sure. In this neighborhood that’s the least you could do.

A diagram on the back shows an evacuation route – she is in a hotel but any resemblance to the Ritz-Carlton pretty much ends there. It is called the Eastside Inn - home to itinerants, back-packers, the mentally lost and anybody else with twenty bucks a night. Stay as long as you like – a day, a month, the rest of your life - all you need is two ID’s, one with a photo.

The guy who had moved into Room 89 had been here for a while – a six-pack sits on a bureau, a stereo and a few CDs are on a nightstand and I glance through them. He had good taste in music, at least you could say that. The closet, however, is empty - it seems like his clothes were about the only thing he took with him when he walked out, leaving the body to liquefy in the bath. Lying at the back of the closet is a pile of trash: discarded newspapers, an empty can of roach killer, a coffee-stained wall calendar. I pick it up - every page features a black and white photo of an ancient ruin – the Coliseum, a Greek temple, the Library of Celsus at night. Very arty. But the pages are blank, not an appointment on any of them – except as a coffee mat, it seems like it’s never been used and I throw it back.

I turn away and - without thinking, out of habit really - I run my hand across the nightstand. That’s strange, no dust. I do the same to the bureau, bed-head and stereo and get the identical result – the killer has wiped everything down to eliminate his prints. He gets no prizes for that but as I catch the scent of something and raise my fingers to my nose, everything changes. The residue I can smell is from an antiseptic spray they use in intensive care wards to combat infection. Not only does it kill bacteria but as a side effect it also destroys DNA material – sweat, skin, hair. By spraying everything in the room and then dousing the carpet and walls, the killer was making sure that the NYPD needn’t bother with their forensic vacuum cleaners.

With sudden clarity I realize that this is anything but a by-the-book homicide for money or drugs or sexual gratification. As a murder, this is something remarkable.

CHAPTER 2

Not everybody knows this – or cares probably – but the first law of forensic science is called Locard’s Exchange Principle and it says ‘every contact between a perpetrator and a crime scene leaves a trace’. As I stand in this room, surrounded by dozens of voices, I’m wondering if Professor Locard had ever encountered anything quite like Room 89 - everything touched by the killer is now in a bath full of acid, wiped clean or drenched in industrial antiseptic. I’m certain there’s not a cell or follicle of him left behind.

Two years ago I wrote an obscure book on modern investigative technique. In a chapter called New Frontiers, I said I had come across the use of an anti-bacterial spray only once in my life – and that was a high-level hit on an intelligence agent in the Czech Republic. That case doesn’t auger well - to this day, it remains unsolved. Whoever had been living in Room 89 clearly knew their business and I start examining the room with the respect it deserves.

He wasn’t a tidy person and among the other trash I see an empty pizza box lying next to the bed. I’m about to pass over it when I realize that’s where he would have had the knife: lying on top of the pizza box within easy reach, so natural Eleanor probably wouldn’t even have registered it.

I imagine her on the bed, reaching under the tangle of sheets for his crotch. She kisses his shoulder, his chest, going down. Maybe the guy knows what he’s in for, maybe not: one of the side-effects of GHB is that it suppresses the gag reflex. There’s no reason a person can’t swallow a seven, eight, ten inch gun – that’s why one of the easiest places to buy it is in gay saunas. Or on porn shoots.

I think of his hands grabbing her – he flips her onto her back and straddles her. She’s thinking he’s positioning himself for her mouth but, casually, his right hand would have dropped to the side of the bed. Unseen, the guy’s fingers find the top of the pizza box then touch what he’s looking for – cold and cheap but because it’s new, more than sharp enough to do the job.

Anybody watching from behind would have seen her back arch, a sort of moan escape her lips – they’d think he must have entered her mouth. He hasn’t. Her eyes, bright with drugs, are flooding with fear. His left hand has clamped tight over her mouth, forcing her head back, exposing her throat. She bucks and writhes, tries to use her arms but he’s anticipated that. Straddling her breasts, his knees slam down, pinning her by the biceps - you can just make out the two bruises on the body lying in the bath. She’s helpless. His right hand rises up into view – Eleanor sees it and tries to scream, convulsing wildly, fighting to get free. The serrated steel of the pizza knife flashes past her breast, towards her pale throat. It slashes hard...

Blood sprays across the bedside table. With one of the arteries which feed the brain completely cut it would have been over in a moment. Eleanor crumples, gurgling, bleeding out. The last vestiges of consciousness, tell her she has just witnessed her own murder, all she ever was and hoped to be is gone. That’s how he did it – he wasn’t inside her at all. Once again, thank God for small mercies I suppose.

The killer goes to prepare the acid bath and along the way pulls off the bloody white shirt he must have been wearing – they just found pieces of it under Eleanor’s body in the bath, along with the knife: four inches long, black plastic handle, made by the millions in some sweatshop in China.

I’m still reeling from the vivid imagining of it all, so I barely register a rough hand taking my shoulder. As soon as I do, I throw it off, about to instantly break his arm – an echo from an earlier life, I’m afraid. It is some guy who mumbles a terse apology, looking at me strangely, trying to move me aside. He’s the leader of a forensic team - three guys and a woman - setting up the UV lamps and dishes of the Fast Blue-B dye they’ll use to test the mattress for semen stains. They haven’t found out about the antiseptic yet and I don’t tell them – for all I know the killer missed a part of the bed. If he did, given the nature of the Eastside Inn, I figure they’ll get several thousand positive hits dating back to when hookers wore stockings.

I get out of their way but I’m deeply distracted: I’m trying to close everything out because there is something about the room, the whole situation – I’m not exactly sure what – that is troubling me. A part of the scenario is wrong and I can’t tell why. I look around, taking another inventory of what I see but I can’t find it – I have a sense it’s from earlier in the night. I go back, mentally rewinding the tape to when I first walked in.

What was it? I reach down into my subconscious, trying to recover my first impression – it was something detached from the violence, minor but with over-riding significance.

If only I could touch it... a feeling... it’s like... it’s some word that is lying now on the other side of memory. I start thinking about how I wrote in my book that it is the assumptions, the unquestioned assumptions, that trip you up every time - and then it comes to me.

When I walked in I saw the six-pack on the bureau, a carton of milk in the fridge, registered the names of a few DVDs lying next to the TV, noted the liner in a trash can. And the impression – the word – that first entered my head but didn’t touch my conscious mind was female. I got everything right about what had happened in Room 89 – except for the biggest thing of all. It wasn’t a young guy who was staying here; it wasn’t a naked man who was having sex with Eleanor and cut her throat. It wasn’t a clever prick who destroyed her features with acid and drenched the room with antiseptic spray.

It was a woman. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Describe the Saracen. What were your initial impressions of him? Did they change throughout the course of I Am Pilgrim. Why or why not?

2. How does Pilgrim get his name? Describe some of his missions.

3. Were there any plot twists that you didn’t see coming in I Am Pilgrim? What was most surprising to while you read.

4. Terry Hayes, the author of I Am Pilgrim, is also a noted screenwriter. Were there any scenes in the book that struck you as particularly cinematic? Discuss them with your book club.

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